Last night I walked through my living room and heard the oh-so-familiar sound of female crying.  What was the cause of this sob fest? Oh, you know...just the run- o-the-mill Monday night drama we all call…The Bachelor. My roommates were watching it and since I’ve given up this particular form of TV crack, I didn’t wait around to watch the train-wreck and hear who got the rose, but I did hear one statement that sent my fingers to typing.  My feet stopped and my heart dropped when I heard the poor girl say, “Who will ever love me?”

Ouch.

As if the Bachelor isn't enough to send any sane woman running to the fridge for cookie dough...for some reason advertisers think it's hilarious to run Valentine's engagement commercials non-stop for the month of February. Lord, it's hard to be a woman!!!! Let me just say--on behalf of my gender--to K Jewelers, Zales, Jared's and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman... please cease and desist with your wretched commercials! 

So …in response to the question posed by the brokenhearted bachelorette, I submit TRUTH that sets us free. The following is an excerpt from my book, Sex and the City Uncovered. This one goes to the girls out there asking the same question...Who will ever love me?

Searching for a soul-filling, unconditional, perfect love in anyone other than God Himself will leave us disappointed and disillusioned. The search itself is destructive because in the end we find that no one can fill our emptiness or give us the security that comes from God alone. But in our society, every romantic movie and fairy tale teaches us to place our hope for this love in a person. We buy into the notion that Prince Charming will sweep us off of our feet and we will never again deal with the wicked stepmother of emptiness or the evil queen of insecurities. As a result, we believe the myth that the perfect persons, our soul mates, will be the ones who can complete us and meet all our needs.

As a single woman I am not immune to the desire for love, nor am I free from the longing for a marriage relationship. But I’ve come to realize single girls can fall prey to the grass-is-greener mentality by thinking, If only I were married, then I wouldn’t feel lonely or empty inside. Little do we know how far from the truth this thought really is. Recently, I’ve had a whole slew of my married friends confess to me that some of their loneliest days have been as married women. Their husbands are wonderful but inadequate at filling their souls. The simple truth is, marriage doesn’t make you happy; it just makes you married.

As a single girl, there are two truths that I must hold in balance in order to be content. First, God created me for relationship, so my desire for a husband is not wrong; it is good. Second, even though I was designed to be in relationship, my ultimate contentment, satisfaction, and happiness will never be achieved simply through a human relationship. I was designed for something far bigger, far greater, something far more satisfying.

It cracks me up how some people think the Bible is totally irrelevant to our modern culture. This makes me laugh because clearly these critics haven’t opened a copy of God’s Word lately. For instance, in the Bible is the story of a woman who, like many of us, found herself “looking for love in all the wrong places.” She, too, hoped the deep thirst of her soul would be quenched in a relationship with a man.

Her story is found in the book of John, chapter 4, and she is often referred to as “the woman at the well.” Let me start by giving you a little background info that will help you appreciate the power of this woman’s story. Typically, women in that culture went to a well to get water for their families early in the morning or late in the evening, when the weather was cooler and transporting the heavy water jar would be easier (side note: Paris Hilton, if you are reading this, a well is where people would go to get water before the days of indoor plumbing). But this woman went at midday, right at the peak of the heat. Why the weird schedule? Well . . . let’s just say she didn’t really fit in with the other ladies.

Imagine Desperate Housewives set in Israel about two thousand years ago. She was the girl on the block whom all the other women despised. She was known as the town tramp. It was emotionally painful for her to go to the well at the normal time of day because she knew she would hear the critical comments and see the disdain in the eyes of the other women. Her love life, or lust life, had been fodder for the village gossips for years, so she chose to avoid the whole situation. So at noon she lugged her empty water jar to the well—alone. And it was in this moment that this broken, disappointed-with-life, and empty-as-her-water-jar woman had a life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ. For the empty water jar was the perfect symbol for her life. I guess you could call it a divine appointment.

He [Jesus] came to a town of Samaria. . . . Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from His journey, sat down at the well. . . . A woman of Samaria came to draw water. “Give Me a drink,” Jesus said to her.      John 4:5–7

 Now, just as strange as it was for this woman to be at the well at noon, it was even stranger still that Jesus purposely went out of His way to meet her. Major cultural taboos were being crossed here. First, Jesus was a Jewish man, and in that day Jews did not associate or speak to people from her region, which was called Samaria. It would be the modern-day equivalent of the racial tension that existed in the southern part of the United States between blacks and whites in the 1960s. But Jesus doesn’t judge a person by her race. Jesus looks past the externals of a person and speaks straight to the issues of the heart. The second cultural taboo broken that day was a gender one. It was not acceptable in that culture for men to speak to women in public. So, you can understand why this woman was doubly surprised when this Jewish man spoke to her.

 “How is it that You, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” she asked Him. For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.

Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would ask Him, and He would give you living water.” John 4:9–10

Imagine this scene: Jesus, weary from traveling the hot dusty roads of Israel, sat down by a well and began a conversation with a woman by simply asking her for a drink. Her response was curt and defensive. She reminded Jesus that she was not only a woman but a Samaritan woman. Who did He think He was to speak to her? Jesus, not dissuaded by her defensiveness, ignored her sharp tongue and turned the conversation to the real issue: her thirst, not His. You see, this woman’s secret thirst was the real reason for this divine encounter.

 “Sir,” said the woman, “You don’t even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this ‘living water’?”      John 4:11

Clearly she was confused. How could this Jewish man give her a drink? He was obviously empty handed. But Jesus led the discussion, and He turned the conversation from one about physical thirst to the real problem: her soul’s thirst for “real love” and His ability to quench it forever.

Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again—ever! In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up within him for eternal life.”

“Sir,” the woman said to Him, “give me this water so I won’t get thirsty and come here to draw water.”      John 4:13–15

Obviously, girlfriend hadn’t clued in yet. She definitely was interested in this mysterious water Jesus offered, but she still didn’t realize He was diagnosing her spiritual problem of “looking for love in all the wrong places.”

“Go call your husband,” He told her, “and come back here.”

“I don’t have a husband,” she answered.

“You have correctly said, ‘I don’t have a husband,’” Jesus said. “For you’ve had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”John 4:16–18

Five husbands? What happened? My mind reels with questions. I try to imagine this woman’s journey from marriage to marriage, each time with a glimmer of hope that perhaps this time she would finally find the love her soul craved. My heart breaks for the disappointment I know she must have felt and the sheer disillusionment that settled in after a while. I wonder if she shacked up with the last guy because she’d given up hope of finding real love altogether—and just simply settled for the life she was living. Here’s the thing I love about Jesus: He went looking for the girl who was losing hope, throwing in the towel, and in desperate need of a soul-satisfying love. I know because He came looking for me.

Notice what Jesus did in this conversation: He used the issue of the woman’s physical thirst to expose her true need. Jesus asked her to go get her husband in order to reveal the real problem: the fact that she had searched from man to man to find satisfaction for her soul, and yet she was still empty. Husband number one didn’t satisfy; maybe number two would do the trick. On and on she went until she was living with someone who was not even her husband. She’d reached a dead-end street in her journey of looking for love.

While living together may be accepted by many in our culture, it certainly wasn’t in that day and time. Jesus didn’t point out her marital history to shame or condemn her; He pointed out her looking-for-love problem so that she could finally find what she was looking for in Him. He told her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Water is a great symbol for God because without water the body will shut down and our internal organs will collapse. The same is true of a life separated from God. Physically, we can’t survive without water—and we can’t really live without Jesus. Friend, do you feel shut down? Does your heart feel as if it might collapse? Read on.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to satisfy the deep thirst of our souls. The definition of thirst is “to painfully feel the want and to eagerly long for something.” Scripture is filled with imagery of God being compared to water for man’s thirsty soul. For example, Psalm 42:1–2 reads, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (NIV). So what are you waiting for, girls? Come on, drink up!!!